This picture, to which reference has been made in the text, hangs at Chatsworth, and has been reproduced by permission of His Grace the Duke of Devonshire. Although Walpole sneered at it when he saw it for the first time, the composition stands to-day among the most admired of the master’s works.
Artists tell us that painting should be no more than a harmony of colour and line, that it should not attempt to cross the borderline that separates painting from literature. They are justified in their attitude, but at the same time we cannot discuss painters in terms of paint, or tell of our admiration of their work by expressing that admiration on canvas. Those of us who are not painters, can only approach art through literature, and seek to find in a man the explanation of his works, and in the works, the revelation of the man.
Joshua Reynolds possessed a master mind. He had wonderful capacity for synthesis and analysis, and something akin to the skilled physician’s gift of diagnosis. As soon as he had built up the foundations of his own art and found a new method of presentation, he turned all his mental capacity to the study of the people who sat for him. As soon as he had achieved technique, the other gifts that no technique could develop came into play, and then his work revealed its extraordinary qualities, side by side with the few limitations that beset his mode of life. In society, Reynolds would seem to have been courtly and reserved. He did not expand to women as he did to men, for he looked upon women and children as subjects for classical treatment. He made them extremely beautiful; he gave them graces and gifts that flatter the imagination of those who gaze upon his pictures to-day: but there are not too many portraits of women among those painted by Reynolds in which there is a large quality of humanity. He suppresses a great part of the human interest that may have been in them, and replaces it with beauty of colour and line. Now and again, of course, he is very fortunate. When he painted the great courtesans of his day, Polly Fisher, Nelly O’Brien, and others of that frail sisterhood, the qualities he omitted left the sitters quite human. There was no suggestion of the classic about them. A Nelly O’Brien at her best is just a woman, while some of the high-born ladies at their best became a little too cold, a little too stately, a little too well-posed for the wicked world they lived in. Even when we consider the famous “Jumping Baby” that hangs at Chatsworth, it is impossible to avoid the thought that if the little one had really been so happy and so playful, the mother’s fine feathers must have been considerably ruffled, and she must have made haste to give the child back to the nurse.
His children, too, are seldom of this world. Reynolds was a hardened old bachelor with an eye for beauty. He had not studied Bellini and Correggio for nothing, and many of his little ones are far more like Italian angels in modern dress than English boys and girls. Of course there are notable exceptions. “Master Crewe as Henry the Eighth” is delightfully English. “The Strawberry Girl” is another picture painted in hours of delightful inspiration, but “The Age of Innocence,” for all its supreme beauty, has a certain quality of conception that is artificial. To look at Reynolds’ women and children is to feel assured that the painter lived a celibate life, and that the stories about intrigues with Angelica Kaufmann and others are misleading and unfounded. We have but to turn to the work of his great contemporaries, Gainsborough and Romney, to see the difference between women in whose veins the blood runs red, and women who feed on nectar and ambrosia and were never seen at a disadvantage in their lives. It seems to the writer that women and children were to Reynolds fit and proper subjects for the exercise of his gifts, but at the same time, folk in whom he had no abiding interest. Men interested him, and when he turned the best of his attention to them, he gave the world work that will endure just as long as the pigments he put down upon the canvas.
The picture of Admiral Keppel, hanging to-day in the National Portrait Gallery, was the first ripe fruit of the painter’s Italian journey, and had produced in the world of art something akin to a sensation. Thereafter Reynolds stood alone as the representative eighteenth-century painter of great men. His rivals could not approach him there. He seemed to see right into the heart and brain of the men who sat for him, to realise clearly and judiciously the part they were playing in life, and he strove to set it down in such a fashion that the character and capacities of the sitter should impress themselves at once upon those who saw the portrait. Other painters might give one aspect of a man, but Reynolds’ vision was far larger—it was completely comprehensive; when he had dealt with a subject, it was well-nigh impossible to approach it again, save in the way of imitation. There was a finality about the treatment that must have baffled and exasperated his rivals. The portraits of Charles James Fox, David Garrick, Laurence Sterne, to name a few, are masterly in their simplicity, in the directness of their appeal, and in the splendid expression of character through features. To satisfy the claims of Reynolds’ brush it was absolutely necessary that his sitters should have character, even if it was a bad one. That is why the portraits of courtesans arouse attention in fashion that women whose characters were undeveloped either for good or for evil will never succeed in doing.
It is not always easy to realise what Reynolds’ work was like at its best, because so many of his canvases have either lost their original tints or have suffered the final indignity of restoration. In his search after the secret of the Venetians he made many elaborate experiments at the expense of his sitters, and pictures that were remarkable in their year for colour that aroused the enthusiasm of connoisseurs grew old even sooner than the sitters. His solid foundations decomposed, the surface colour of many a celebrity is now as pale as the sitter’s own ghost may be supposed to be. Here there is perhaps some excuse for looking at Reynolds’ work from the literary standpoint, because though the harmony of line may remain, the harmony of colour has gone beyond recall, and there are some at least of Reynolds’ pictures in which the colour, had it been preserved, would have been the most effective quality. At times the great artist’s draughtsmanship was far removed from excellence. And yet when criticism has said its last word, the name and fame of Sir Joshua Reynolds will remain the pride of British art and the admiration of the civilised world.
The plates are printed by Bemrose Dalziel, Ltd., Watford
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh